Shadow Valley: A Novel of Horror

by Michael R. Collings

Shadow Valley is a small, isolated farming community known to few. There is little there to attract the attention of passers-by, but within one of the ramshackle old farmhouses, set in a swale some distance from the rest, there dwells a power that threatens death and destruction to any who might broach its secrets. Now, decades of tenuous stability are at risk when young Lila Ellis arrives to make the final arrangements for a project that will culminate in Shadow Valley being flooded to create a reservoir. She alone must enter the old Stevenson place, and she alone must face its terrors-beginning with a pile of seventy boxes of chocolates, one piece missing from each, delivered to the front door of the decaying house each and every year on St. Valentine's Day. Can Lila escape the evil that haunts the old place? Or will the curse continue for another generation?

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First published August 1, 2011

About the author

Michael Robert Collings is an American author, poet, literary critic, and bibliographer, and a former professor of creative writing and literature at Pepperdine University. He was Poet in Residence at Pepperdine's Seaver College from 1997-2000.

Collings has had multiple collections of his poetry published on subjects such as Latter Day Saint theology, Joseph Smith, Christmas, science fiction, and horror. He is known for his literary critiques and bibliographies of the works of Orson Scott Card and Stephen King, though he has also published critiques and bibliographies of the works of Peter Straub, Dean Koontz, C. S. Lewis, Brian W. Aldiss, and Piers Anthony. His In the Image of God: Theme, Characterization and Landscape in the Fiction of Orson Scott Card was the first book-length academic look at Card's works.

Michael Robert Collings was born on October 29, 1947 in Rupert, Idaho. He graduated from Bakersfield College in 1967 with an Associate's degree, then graduated with a Bachelor's degree in English from Whittier College two years later. After graduating with a Master's degree in English from the University of California, Riverside in 1973, Collings received his Ph.D. in English literature from UCR in 1977, specializing in Milton and The Renaissance.

Before he began teaching creative writing and literature at Pepperdine University, Collings taught at UCR, San Bernardino Valley Community College, and UCLA. He taught at Pepperdine from 1979 until 2010, when he retired. He now lives in Idaho with his wife, Judi. His son, Michaelbrent Collings, is a fantasy and horror writer.